Julius Caesar isn't one of Shakespeare's more loveable plays, but the Globe's
new production is captivating, says Charles Spencer

On a glorious summer afternoon, the pre-show atmosphere at this production of Julius Caesar put me in mind of a rock festival. There were hawkers, musicians and entertainers, lots of drink and food and that exciting sense of a crowd that was really up for it.

Yet what always amazes me is the rapt concentration of the Globe audience once the play has begun. It’s gruelling to stand for almost three hours and concentrate on the narrative and the poetry, and almost as hard to endure the hard backless benches if you are in the seated parts of this amazing auditorium. But attention rarely falters. There is a rapport between the performers and the audience that feels genuinely magical.

Julius Caesar is a tricky play to pull off. A lot of the steam goes out of the drama after the assassination of Caesar and the big set-piece speeches of Brutus and the rabble-rousing Mark Antony. The drama dwindles into bickering, reports of unseen battles, and noble suicides.

But though Dominic Dromgoole’s production – staged in Elizabethan dress with Roman trimmings and with music played on period instruments that make a speciality of fruity, fart-like noises – cannot completely disguise the diminution in the play’s quality after the interval, it holds the audience’s attention even in Shakespeare’s less inspired passages.

This is largely thanks to the freshness of the acting and the fact that this is a great public play that suits the Globe to a tee. As first, Brutus and then Antony address the audience after the assassination of Caesar it is as if we were the Roman citizens who hold the future of the empire in our hands. Will we back the “honourable” Brutus, or “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” as Mark Antony goads his listeners into fury with his mesmerising oratory over Caesar’s blood-drenched corpse?

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There are some cracking performances from actors who are younger than we usually see in this play. Tom McKay skilfully nails the insufferable smugness of Brutus, who thinks he knows the right and honest course of action yet always gets it wrong. Almost every decision he makes proves a disaster but like a scurvy politician, nothing dents his belief in his own rectitude. He even uses his wife’s suicide as an opportunity to display his own stoicism.

Anthony Howell memorably captures the both the chippiness and the underlying emotional neediness of Cassius that makes him defer to Brutus even though his own political instincts are sounder, while Luke Thompson’s Mark Antony, initially discovered nursing a hangover, has a thrilling oratorical fervour as he whips the mob into a fury.

One of the curiosities of the play is that Julius Caesar himself has little to do except to get himself killed, but George Irving makes the most of his scant opportunities in a compelling performance with more than a hint of a Mafia godfather about it. And in this oppressively masculine play Catherine Bailey is deeply touching as Brutus’s neglected wife who poignantly asks her husband: “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?”

Julius Caesar will never be a play I love, but there is no doubt that this lively production makes a strong case for its merits.